Dr. David Evans will discuss his 1966-1967 fieldwork with blues singers in Mississippi, Louisiana, and California, as described in his book Going Up The Country: Adventures In Blues Fieldwork in the 1960s, co-authored with Marina Bokelman (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2022). Recorded examples and photographs of the artists will be used as illustrations, followed by some performances by Evans with guitar. The presentation will discuss the purposes of the fieldwork, problems encountered in the field, the personalities and artistry of the the musicians, and other topics.
Dr. Evans is one of the most important contemporary academic musicologists specializing in blues music and is the author of the seminal Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues (1982). Among his many honors, he has won two Grammy™ awards for "Best Album Notes" and received a Fulbright Specialist fellowship to Ethiopia. He holds a B. A. degree from Harvard and M. A. and Ph. D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. Evans is the author of The NPR Curious Listener's Guide to Blues (2005) and many other publications. He has produced more than 50 albums of field and studio recordings, many of them for the University of Memphis's High Water Records. Dr. Evans is Professor of Music Emeritus at The University of Memphis, where he taught from 1978 to 2016.
While studying at UCLA in the 1960s, Evans began making trips to the southern states to research and record blues, gospel, and folk musicians. He first recorded the singer Jack Owens in 1966 and later produced records by him, Jessie Mae Hemphill, R. L. Burnside, and many other musicians. As a performer (blues vocal and guitar) Evans has made over seventy international tours to twenty-two countries and has recorded six CDs.
